Excuse the Hogs (episode #1596)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. On the A Way with Words Facebook group, a recent thread had me laughing out loud. Remember, Kathy Bird started it with a post that said simply, episodes, the Greek god of continuing stories. Keep it going.

And I thought, what? Yeah, I finally figured out that she was mispronouncing episodes as epicities.

Oh, epicities.

There we go. You know, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

And a lot of people chimed in, and pretty soon we had this whole pantheon of mispronounced English words that sound like Greek gods.

Stephen Fessler wrote, Lamanides, the god of cool refreshment.

Set of lemonades.

Yeah.

And Craig O’Connor said, Particles, the god of little bits that get missed by the vacuum.

Particles. Particles.

And I like this one from Jay Banks. He said, Anklees, the god of podiatry.

Oh, that’s good. Anklees, ankles.

Yeah, I love that.

And then Christine Porter suggested the god of impediments. Can you guess what that one is?

The god of obstakles?

Yes.

Or obstakles, I guess.

Obstakles.

We had a great quiz from John Chanesky on this very topic, turning everyday words into Greek names. We’ll link to that on our waywordradio.org website.

We also welcome right now your calls, 877-929-9673, toll-free in the U.S. and Canada, or email us words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name’s Rebecca, and I’m from Concord, North Carolina, and I’m calling about the word deplane.

You’re calling about the word deplane?

Are you a flight attendant?

Exactly.

And I’ve been using this word, and it just creates friction in my ears when I say it, because it just doesn’t seem as polished as some of the other words that we use on the plane.

And we end up using it as a catch-all for the process of exiting the aircraft. But it just seems so strange because the word deplane itself does not actually denote what we’re doing.

We’re not disembarking, we’re deplaning. It’s a strange combination of usages.

So deplane doesn’t equal disembark?

Well, I think it would, but is it in the same way that deforest? You know, when you deforest, you rid of the forest. When you deplane, you don’t rid of the plane.

Well, you can’t do, don’t you? Toss the plane away.

Rebecca, when you’re talking to the crew or to your passengers, how do you use the word deplane?

We’d say as soon as everyone deplanes, we’ll grab a cup of coffee.

Okay.

So you’re talking to your colleagues then?

We would. It’s amongst ourselves. And we do use this word with the public, but with so many languages coming on board and so many backgrounds, we just use this word to encompass that process.

And it just doesn’t seem to be the most beautiful word that we could choose, but it is effective. It is efficient. It just doesn’t seem very polished.

Effective and efficient.

Yeah, I think you’ve keyed in on probably why that gets used.

So you talk about de-planing with the passengers. You say as soon as we de-plane, you can do this or that.

Exactly. So it’s something like, you know, if there’s weather and all of a sudden we’re not going anywhere, well, everyone grab your belongings, we’ll de-plane, and we’ll figure out another solution.

And just that process of gathering and exiting for the word de-plane, but it almost sounds as if it needs to be hyphenated or used with air quotes because it just doesn’t seem like the right word for such an industry.

I know in the UK they use the word deboard, which is the opposite of board.

Yeah, Rebecca, that’s so interesting that you mentioned that, because I’m thinking, well, what would the opposite of deplane mean? I mean, it’s not like you plane. You know, it’s not like you get on board the aircraft by planing, or you don’t emplane.

So where did D-plane come from?

But you do board in aircraft.

Well, you do, actually.

You do. And actually, we have some evidence that D-plane may actually come from the idea of D-training, to get off a train. And D-train itself probably comes from D-bark.

And D-bark means to get off a boat because bark originally meant boat. And that’s what disembark means, to get yourself off of a boat.

And particularly in the military, you will find things like de-train, de-truck, de-boat, de-bike, and de-bus. So, you know, adding that D-E to the front of the word, you know, is obviously the simpler choice.

But is it, you know, the most perfect option? Well, it does the job, maybe inelegantly, but it certainly gets right to the point and communicates the meaning.

So, in that regard, it does it. And things like unplane and off plane just really don’t sound any better, do they?

No. Again, it’s that, you know, just get it out and get the point across to get them off the plane and keep going.

So it is just for efficiency, but it definitely misses that beautiful, glamorous, you know, image that you think of when one travels.

But Rebecca, that must be so weird then if you really have a thing about this word, if you’re really irritated by this word, but you have to say it again and again and again every day.

We smile through it, just like so many of my colleagues. We say that word and I just can’t help but roll my eyes a little bit and say I’m part of the problem. I’m part of this ugly word that’s floating around and I just don’t have anything better to use.

So maybe I will start using my disembark.

Or Rebecca, you could just say the word de plane and roll your eyes and think of Grant and me and thinking about language and that kind of thing.

Well, it definitely all comes to a point on an aircraft with, you know, 20 different languages, 20 different regional dialects and one announcement. So it definitely is fun up in the air listening to all the different words and languages and ideas that all culminate on one flight.

That sounds amazing.

Well, Rebecca, fly safely, all right?

Oh, we appreciate it. And take care of yourself.

Thanks for taking my call.

Thanks, Rebecca.

Bye-bye.

Tell us about the language you use in your workplace, jargon, slang. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us the whole story in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha and Grant. This is Jonas calling from beautiful Chatham, Virginia.

Hi, Jonas.

Hi, Jonas. What’s up?

All right. Although now I teach at a girls’ boarding school, once upon a time, I taught at a boys’ independent school. And I taught English up in the upper school up in the 12th grade and also coach track. So one day, waiting for track practices to start, and one of my colleagues from the lower school where the seventh and eighth graders live, you know, walked up and he’s shaking his head. And I was like, coach, what’s happening? And he said, coach, all week, I’ve told the algebra class that they’re going to have a test and I gave it today. And none of those jabronis must have studied because half of them failed it.

And I immediately barked laughter and said, jabronis. And he said, yep. And I said, what does that even mean? And he said, no idea. But he said one of my teachers when I was in grade school used it, and I’ve been using it ever since.

So it entered my lexicon on that very day, and I’ve used it constantly without really ever having thought about what it exactly means until a couple months ago in one of my college English classes. I just sort of used it, and a student’s little hand kind of raises like a balloon and says, coach, what is a jabroni? And I said, you know, like a knucklehead type thing.

But it occurred to me that I really had no idea what it means, and so I’m hoping that the oracles of etymology would be able to help me with this.

I like that her hand raises like a balloon. I can see it slowly going up.

It’s funny because jabroni, I think, is widespread enough because of TV and movies that it’s not regional, if it ever was. But most people who’ve ever looked into it, and by that I mean lexicographers and etymologists, there seems to be something Italian about it.

It’s funny because it’s not an Italian word.

The best guess that we know of that it might, and this is completely a guess, come from a dialect word from Milan that means hambone.

Giamboni.

And partly because that’s the butt of the animal, but also because ham has similar derogatory notions in Italian that it does in English.

A ham is somebody who’s like, you know, they’re not fully committed to something. They’re kind of goofing off. They’re not paying attention, that sort of thing.

But it goes back at least 100 years in English. We can find it again and again in the early days, curiously enough, in the magazine Variety, you know, this Hollywood journal of what’s going on in the entertainment business.

I don’t know why, but a lot of the early print uses first show up in that magazine. And it didn’t always mean like a knucklehead, although I think that’s a really good synonym.

Sometimes in the beginning it was an outsider or a new immigrant or a naive person, a newcomer. But it also could mean a thug or a gangster or a gunman, a hood, a tough.

Wow. I mean, that part never occurred to me. I mean, it just struck me. I immediately knew what he was talking about. Maybe it’s because he’s dealing with eighth graders.

But it’s so fun to say and so sort of onomatopoeic. And I appreciate what you’ve told me about this. When I mentioned that I work at a girl school, the thing about that term is that I can’t imagine ever using it to refer to girls.

Yeah, it does have something masculine about it, right? Jabroni. It just seems like a chump, a big palooka. I tend to associate it with professional wrestling. That’s mainly the context where I’ve heard it.

Well, it has come up in professional wrestling. Certainly since the 90s, it was borrowed into professional wrestling where it typically means a wrestler who is scripted to lose, also known as a jobber. But it really just started appearing there about 30 years ago.

So it doesn’t come from wrestling, but it’s used in wrestling. A couple of things before we go. I have a couple of books that have really looked into Italian-American language, including the dialects of Italian spoken in the United States.

And neither one of them mentions this term. So we’re not really sure that it is Italian. And the other thing is there are something like 16 or 17 different spellings that I’ve collected over the years for this term.

You might encounter it and wonder, is that the same word? And it probably is. All right. Excellent. Well, thanks for weighing in on this. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for your call, Jonas. All right. Y’all take care. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Jonas. Bye.

877-929-9673. More about language and how we use it as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett.

And it’s the guy with the crossword hat and the checkerboard shirt. And what’s he using as a belt? It looks like measuring tape? That’s weird.

It’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski. Hello, Grant. Hello, Martha. You know, it’s very, very funny that you happened to mention my crossword shirt and my crossword tie.

Because today’s quiz is about crosswords. Oh, boy. Yes. Oh, boy. On social media people, someone once said lately, who still loves crosswords?

And, of course, the question blew my mind because all my friends are not only crossword fans. They’re connoisseurs. Some of them are crossword legends.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who has a favorite constructor, chances are you have a favorite clue, a clue you’ve come across that you find to be particularly clever.

Now, I’ve mentioned this before. My favorite go-to has always been first place, a four-letter answer. You remember what that is? The first place was Eden.

Eden, right. Always a favorite of mine. Very clever, simple clue. Now, I’m going to give you some classic crossword clues that I’ve recently come across that I think are very clever.

And you give me the answers, of course. A lot of these are usually featured with a question mark after them because they’re sort of punny, like this one. Chamber of Commerce. Five letters.

Chamber of Commerce. Store. Store, yes. Very good. I’m going to write that one in. Good. This one’s similar. It makes a lot of money. Four letters.

A mint. Yes, a mint. Nice. And it freshens your breath as well. Let’s see this one. Class struggle. Four letters. Class struggle. Four letters. Let’s see.

So this is something, the pun is, maybe it’s about schools and not socioeconomics. Mm— Test? Yes, test, test.

While you were thinking, I did also think to myself, oh, you know, quiz could also work for this one. Yeah, or exam. Very good. Three possibles.

How about this one? Serves well done. Four letters. Aces. Aces, yes. Nice going, Martha. I like this one. October surprise. Three letters.

Pie. Pie is always a pleasant surprise, but no, it’s not pie. October surprise. Oh. Is it at the end of the month? Oh, yeah. Boo?

It’s boo, yes. Nicely done. Finally, one of my favorites. Put away the groceries. Three letters. Eat. Eat, yes.

I love all these crossword clues. Thank you to all the great constructors who created these classic clues. I just, I culled them from all the works of all the puzzles I’ve worked on.

Joe Fagliano, Sean Kennedy, Lynn Lempel, Mike Shank, Patrick Blendauer, David Kahn, Catherine Seta, Ed Sessa, Ashley Solveria. I love these, I love these people. They are my heroes.

So go out and do a crossword. Thank you, John. Thank you, guys. I got to get on my puzzles. I’m a little bit behind my crossword puzzles.

You know, we’d love to hear your favorite crossword puzzle clues or any joke or pun or a little bit of wisdom that you’ve got to share that has to do with language or words or speaking or writing well.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant. This is Jules. How are you? Hi, Jules. Where are you calling from? I am calling from D.C., specifically the airport. I’m calling from the airport.

Great. Great to talk with you. What’s up, Jules? Well, I was calling because I was at a meeting a few weeks ago, and a bunch of different government stakeholders,

And one of the gentlemen got up on stage and said, everything that we discussed today will be subject to Chatham House rules. And everyone around me, except for me, started chuckling and kind of nodded their heads in agreement.

So, of course, I started to laugh along and shake my head as well, but I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing to. I had never heard that expression before.

So that’s my question is really what did I agree to when I agreed to keep everything said to? And that’s like when you click yes on the software licensing rules without reading the pages of text.

Pretty much. And now that I’m broadcasting this on like international radio, I’m hoping that’s not falling under it. No, you’re fine as far as we know about the Chatham House rules.

So this was a big deal meeting or just kind of a meeting where things were sensitive? Yeah, perhaps sensitive. Okay.

Yeah. And actually, it’s just one Chatham House rule. Some people call it Chatham House rules, but it’s just one. And it goes back to the Chatham House, which is a think tank and a research institute in London that’s also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

And this is something that grew out of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I. And this organization, it has a mission to bring people together and break down barriers and generate ideas about foreign policy and try to find solutions.

And to that end, in 1927, the Institute adopted what they called the Chatham House Rule, because this Institute is situated in Chatham House, which is on St. James Square in London.

This Chatham House rule basically says that if you’re in a meeting, you’re morally obligated to keep secret the person who provides you information or that person’s affiliation.

So it’s a way of encouraging people to share freely. You know, what happens in Chatham stays in Chatham, or at least it doesn’t have anybody’s name attached.

So it’s a way of encouraging people in a meeting to kick around ideas, share inside information, maybe risk sharing something, an idea that you haven’t quite fully formed yet.

And you can trust that nobody is going to say that you’re the person who said it when you get out of that meeting.

Does that make sense?

It absolutely does.

And it also explains why he used a very clearly imitated British accent when he made that declaration.

So that resonates now. Now I see.

Well, don’t tell us who it was because then you’d be breaking the Chatham House rule.

Absolutely not. Mum’s the what?

So I’m in the clear. That’s the good news.

Yeah, you’re in the clear.

I did what I experienced there and I didn’t tell you who said it, so I’m good.

One thing to make note of, this isn’t just for the press.

This is for anyone who attended, including wait staff or people running the sound, anyone who’s there.

Very interesting. Well, good. I can have this in my arsenal now.

Okay. Well, thank you guys.

You’ll save me the embarrassment of being in another forum one day when I have to agree on how to reach the Chatham House rule.

Right. You’ll be spreading the term next thing you know.

Yeah. And that’s Chatham, C-H-A-T-H-A-M. Chatham House.

Well, I’ll make sure that my buddy on the plane knows that everything we discussed is subject to the Chatham House.

Perfect.

Take care, Jules. Thanks for calling.

Thank you both.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

A couple more examples of English words that are mispronounced so that they sound like Greek names.

Emmett O’Keefe on our Facebook group suggested the name Vehicles, who is the god of getting there faster.

Eglis. One thing I love about these is that they invert that almost cliched old joke about clothing, which is Euripides eumenides.

Right.

Where you turn Greek names into English words.

Yeah, and then you start looking at these words and you can’t not do it in your head.

He also mentioned Chronicles, who is the god of boring old stories.

No, I love Chronicles.

And another one of my favorites, Grant, was from Emmett Red, who talked about the god of low power consuming lamps.

And that’s L-E-D-E-Ds.

L-E-D-E-Ds.

Oh, that was clever.

877-929-967-380s.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heidi, and I am calling from Texas.

Well, hello, Heidi, and welcome.

What can we do for you?

I have a question about how you pronounce the show me state.

When I was growing up, we lived all over the country and all over the world.

Whenever we moved, people would always ask us where we were from.

And since my father’s family was also nomadic, we quite often just referred to my mother’s home state as our home as the state of Missouri.

And people would always ask us why we said that.

And we would always just tell them, well, that’s what people from Missouri call it.

And then when I moved to Missouri in the 90s, nobody called it that.

I was always taught that that’s how you said it.

And then I was there and I met people from all over the state and no one ever called it Missouri.

And so I just kind of wanted to know who says this.

I know that it’s a valid pronunciation because it was always a joke that when politicians flew in, they would automatically all of a sudden call it Missouri, having never heard that before.

So I just wanted to know who possibly, where this pronunciation comes from, or why did it change?

We don’t know.

There’s actually a really interesting quote by a linguist where he talks about the action on Bill Labov, William Labov.

He has talked about a lot of vowel changes in language, and he talks about the, we don’t have the answer to the riddle of actuation.

We sometimes just don’t know why things change, they just do.

But with Missouri and Missouri, we have, fortunately, a really fantastic academic paper published posthumously on behalf of Donald Lance, who was a linguist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who wrote about the history of this term.

So he tracked down all the original spellings of Missouri that we have from the French explorers and trappers and so forth, the very earliest that we know of.

And he tracked down the way the native Indians would have pronounced it, and he tracked down other things like that.

And so we have all this data.

The short version is it’s always been kind of in dispute, the pronunciation of this word.

But what we really see here, it’s not Missouri alone that is sometimes pronounced with that E becoming an.

There are other words that fall into this.

Think of Cincinnati or Cincinnati College.

They’re all going, yeah.

Why do some people say Cincinnati?

Or Miami, Potosi, Hawaii, Corpus Christi, Mississippi, spaghetti, macaroni, ravioli, galeoli, prairie.

All of these sometimes sound with an or a schwa at the end.

And there’s something larger happening here than just as happening with Missouri.

It’s possible that there’s that last syllable because it’s not stressed.

It’s unstressed.

It goes from either some value of a short or a long I to becoming a schwa.

Because some Missourians don’t say Missouri or Missouri.

They say Missouri.

More like that E in get or met.

And that readily lends itself to becoming a schwa.

So there are actually four pronunciations of Missouri that are going around.

That said, as of about 40 years ago, the northwest part of the state,

Now where did you live when you moved to Missouri?

The Kansas City area.

Okay, so that part of the state 40 years ago was a bit more likely, not a lot, but a bit more likely to say Missouri, and the rest of the state was a bit more likely to say Missouri.

However, that was 40 years ago.

And the trend over the years, according to surveys done by Donald, Lance, and others of students and other phone surveys, is that the Missouri pronunciation was taking over.

And the Missouri pronunciation was disappearing, except, as you say, by politicians who think that they’re going to garner some votes by seeming like an authentic Missourian.

Yes.

Well, Grant, you’re an authentic Missourian.

Yeah, I say Missouri.

But, you know, that’s because I’m younger.

And pretty much my father, who passed away a few years ago, he said Missouri.

And so that’s typically my question for you is when you went to Missouri or Missouri, Heidi, did you make friends with people who are a lot older than you?

Say 30 years older than you.

No, not really.

Most of my friends did say Missouri.

And most of the people that I was seeing were my age.

So they would be now mostly in their 40s.

Right. So at the time you had moved there, if you’d met people three decades or four decades older than you, you would have met a lot more people who said Missouri because it was what they call an age-graded pronunciation.

It is a pronunciation that belongs to an older generation that is passing on.

And it will eventually just become an artifact of history probably.

So, Heidi, thank you for the field report.

Yeah, I really appreciate it.

Try us again in 30 years. We’ll see if there’s anybody left who says Missouri.

Yeah, it’ll just be me.

Put that on your calendar.

Thank you.

Thanks, Heidi.

Bye.

We’re talking about language, and we’d love to talk with you, so give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Tim White from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Hi, Tim. How are you doing?

Well, I am curious.

My father had a saying that he would use, especially when we didn’t always do things as we were told.

And I have no idea where it came from.

I’ve tried to research it and haven’t gotten any further than just looking it up.

And the saying he used was, you can give them books and give them books, but they just chew the covers right off.

You can give them books and give them books, but they’ll just chew the covers right off.

And when would he use this or about whom?

Well, it really just depends on how the person was acting.

It’s normally if you give someone a general direction or you ask something from somebody and they either did not follow the directions at all or just went their own way with it and it didn’t turn out as expected.

He was a foreman for construction sites.

So he had to make sure everything was well done and within, you know, standards of what they need to do.

But sometimes people would just kind of deviate the course.

And that was when it would often come in.

Sometimes at home if we would try to do something and it didn’t turn out quite as expected. That would be the saying that I heard more often.

Okay. And would he use it in the context of, you know, you try to give somebody something valuable and they don’t appreciate it? They don’t have any idea what it’s worth?

I think it’s less of a value and more of not even understanding what it is for.

Okay. Okay. Not even having a clue. So it really is like casting pearls before swine, right?

Yes.

Yeah, about the origin, we’re not really sure about this. I know Grant has some ideas about this.

I have a pet theory.

Yeah, he does have a pet theory or hypothesis. This is an expression that’s gone back decades for sure, and there are lots of different versions of it.

Like you send them to school, you buy them their books, and what do they do? They eat the books.

Or I buy books and books, and all you do is chew the covers. I’m looking at a newspaper from 1949 where a colonist says, the folks keep sending me to school, but all I do is eat the covers off the books.

Bookworm, you know. So the idea, as you suggest, is the idea of somebody who doesn’t know how to use books, you know, whether it’s a toddler or a goat.

Grant, what about your favorite?

Well, yeah, at the base of it, it’s just like an infant chewing board books, right? They think of it as just something to relieve their sore gums and not something to learn from.

But there was another thing that was happening in American culture in the 1930s and 1940s. And this was a fad or trend of college students eating unusual things, usually for fame or attention, sometimes for money.

You’ve probably heard of the eating live goldfish.

Yeah.

Well, 1939 was kind of the heyday of that, and it was a fairly widespread craze. Sometimes with competition between schools, one student swallowed 89 in one sitting.

Other creatures they ate were grasshoppers, a salamander, the head of a water snake. But it wasn’t just animals or living things.

An Oklahoman college student ate a deflated football. An Oregon State student ate 129 angle worms and won $5. Another student ate the cover off of a baseball. And someone else ate the covers off of magazines.

Then there were marathon eating contests, like people would eat lots of eggs or oysters or hamburgers in one sitting. And so my theory is that this expression may stem from this fad of sending your kid off to college for education.

But instead all they do is these eating stunts. Just a guess.

That about sizes up. I believe that that’s, it works around that. It’s funny because, like I said, I’d never connected all of those things.

And if you do a general search, it doesn’t really go into that much history. But that beams in right around the time that he would have been, you know, in his 20s or late 20s. And those things would have definitely been in his mind.

Well, thank you so much. I’m glad you can answer that question. It’s been puzzling me for years.

All right. Take care now. We appreciate it, Timothy. Thanks for coming. Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

The years we’re in school are some of the best times for new language. We pick up most of our slang, a lot of old sayings, fun things we put in the back of yearbooks, stuff that just pops up.

You’ll be doing the dishes. You’re like, I haven’t thought of that in 30 years. Well, this is the place to share that thing you haven’t thought of in 30 years. 877-929-9673.

Or that thing you learned yesterday, words@waywordradio.org. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. A few weeks ago, we had a conversation about monastic orders that develop their own sign language because they weren’t allowed to talk.

And that prompted a fascinating email about the power of silence. It’s from Cameron Brick. He’s originally from California, but now lives in the Netherlands, where he’s assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam.

He writes, as a teenager for a school project, I once went seven days on a field trip without talking, and it was incredibly lonely. But there was also a surprising side effect.

When listening to people talk, I felt about 15% smarter. I could hold more thoughts in memory and operate on them more freely. Very strange experience, like flowers for Algernon.

I realized that this extra capacity was from not rehearsing a response. Even when we’re silent in a movie or lecture, we’re still rehearsing. It took five or so days for this to calm down and be replaced by a smooth, still lake of more complete listening.

At about 30 years old, I went on a silent backpacking trip with my girlfriend. It went fine, we heard more birds, and we wrote in a notebook when we needed to communicate.

One dusky night, sitting outside of the tent, I realized my feet were covered in mosquitoes. I’m particularly allergic to the bites, so I knew that I had 20 minutes of agony coming up.

If I’d been able to talk, I would have started complaining and kept it up for a while. Not being able to talk, this instinct was thwarted, and I just had to sit there and accept that it was happening.

It was too much work to go to the tent, get the headlamp, get the notebook, write down my complaint. To my surprise, this inability to talk dramatically lessened the discomfort.

I think we don’t always realize how language can also reinforce our suffering, maybe especially when we’re lost in a narrative of deservingness. And Grant, then he goes on to talk about the old Buddhist parable about the second arrow, that anytime we suffer, two arrows fly our way.

And in life, you can’t always control the first arrow, but your reaction to the second arrow is optional, you know, how you react to your suffering. And I just thought that was such a fascinating letter.

It is. It’s so true. I did nothing quite as extensive as his moments of silence or his times of silence, but I did a a day-long silent retreat as part of a mindfulness course.

And I didn’t have quite the experience that he did, but sitting on a college campus, sign it, no phone, no watch, no book, no radio, nobody else just sitting there is freeing.

And not just because you don’t have responsibilities for that moment, but you don’t find yourself, like he said, preparing and you don’t find yourself arguing with other people in your mind. That’s a lot of what is happening.

You are doing a lot of role playing these what if scenarios. What if this person next to me wants to do X? Well, what am I going to say? So some of the mental load that you’re carrying doesn’t have to be carried.

You know, we’re preparing these conversations that don’t need to take place. We can have them. We can have these conversations at the time they’re necessary and not before then.

You know, that’s so interesting because you were talking about the experience of sitting there with no phone and nobody to talk to. And I was preparing for what you were going to say.

Well, you are in radio.

Yeah. And the last word I expected to hear you say was freeing. I thought you were going to say it was so frustrating, but freeing, that’s so interesting.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it reminds me of what an improv teacher once told our class about the need to just go on stage without preparing anything, just to have a mind like water.

And you go out there with a mind like water, and it’s affected by what’s around you. But you don’t come with anything prepared, and magic can happen then.

Yeah, the ripples of water aren’t there until the thing enters the water.

Exactly, whether it’s moonlight or a pebble. So thanks, Cameron Brick, for that wonderfully thoughtful email.

Martha, this is a great conversation, and I’m hoping our listeners will chime in with a lot more of their ideas about making silence in the hubbub of daily conversation.

You can email us, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter what you’ve been reading along these lines @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Zach Messenbrink. I am from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Zach. What’s up?

How are you?

I work for the railroad here in Omaha, and we have a lot of terminology.

And one thing that has always got me is the idea of tying up.

We do not clock off or log off or clock out. As railroad employees, we tie up.

And it is something that I haven’t been able to trace back very easily.

So I figured I’d give you a call.

So I’m going to tie up. I’ll see you tomorrow?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

What time did you guys tie up yesterday?

Yeah, go ahead and pull that train out and get it parked and tie it up.

All right.

We can help a little bit with this.

I think that the best old-time glossary that I know of railroad language is Freeman Hubbard’s 1945 work, and he defines tie up as stop for a meal or a rest.

So right away, we can see that there’s a little bit of change has happened there in the 50-some-odd years since then.

Well, I guess more than 50, but 70 years.

One other interesting thing I’ve seen here leads me to believe, and this is through all the different uses I’ve seen in the railroad journals, because there’s so many of them, is that it looks like it’s not just about people, but it could be about your rolling stock, your cars and your engines and so forth.

So it’s about putting a rolling stock out of service or on a siding or off the main line, either for a moment or overnight.

Yeah, so it could be a rolling stock or your personnel.

At least historically, that’s what it was about.

And then even saw somebody use it to mean that they retired from a career of the railroads.

I’ve tied up after 30 years in the business is how they phrased it.

I have not heard that one.

Yeah. But I can find it as far back as the 1880s.

And this quote from the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Journal, if that doesn’t give you tingles, I don’t know what will.

Yeah, I’m sure there are people out there that are getting all kinds of tingles.

It goes like this. Mother Nature gave the road an idea of what to expect every winter when a snowstorm, followed by rain and sleet, covered the ground with a glassy coating of foot thick.

The next day, the road was tied up tight for one engine was disabled, and without help, the other couldn’t even reach the main line.

And by road in there, they mean railroad.

And I wonder, do they still use that, Zach?

That road, just a short way to say railroad?

Yep.

My insurance company is the Iron Road Insurance.

Oh, there we go.

Exactly right.

Yeah.

And probably this tie-up sense comes from ships, because we have a long history of a language from ships being borrowed into railroad language, especially in the early days.

A lot of the metaphors are the same.

A lot of the roles were the same in the early days.

So I would not be surprised that tying up a ship at a port or a pier isn’t exactly the language that was borrowed into railroading.

I can definitely see that.

We have transportation in common.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And didn’t there used to be pilots? Railroad people were called pilots at one point?

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, still to this day, the people that move the engines around to put them on trains will be called hostlers.

And the guy that’s connected to the hostler to line switches and move him around will be called the hostler pilot.

There we go.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Hostler like horse then? Somebody who handles a horse?

Exactly.

Yep. But yeah, the host, we’re in the pilot. We still call them the pilots.

Well, Zach, thank you for sharing this language. I know there’s a whole much more railroad talk that we’d love to hear at another time.

So think about it and give us another call, all right?

Absolutely. I’ll be in touch with you. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Take care and be safe.

Yep. Yep. You guys have a good day.

Bye, Zach.

Call us to talk about the language of your workplace. 877-929-9673.

2,000 years before Call of Duty and Fortnite, little kids in ancient Rome were playing games with nuts, and specifically walnuts. There’s a Latin poem from that era in which a walnut tree describes some of those games, which involved tossing nuts or rolling them, kind of like pitching pennies or an ancient version of cornhole.

The poem is called Nux, N-U-X, which in Latin means nut. And the diminutive of this word is nucula, little nut. And that’s the source, as you know, Grant, of nucleus, meaning the kernel of a nut and eventually the core of other things.

And the plural of Latin nux is nusis, which gave us the lovely Latin phrase nusis relinquere, which in its most literal sense means to give up nuts.

But really what it means in Latin is to pass out of childhood, to put away your toys, put away childish things, and get on with the serious business of life.

Nusis relinquere, relinquish your toys. That’s how important nuts were to the playtime of a child back then.

Yeah, yeah.

I just thought that was a lovely phrase.

Instead of marbles or jacks, they had nuts.

Yeah, makes sense, right?

Yeah, sure. It makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if they painted them or carved them.

You know, I can imagine walnut shelves carved to look like animals or soldiers or that sort of thing.

I don’t know.

But certainly these tossing games are games almost like marbles, you know?

Yeah, I can imagine that.

I just thought that was a beautiful way to say moving into adulthood, you know, leaving behind those little toys.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Janet Harkins. I’m calling from Aiken, South Carolina.

What’s on your mind today, Janet?

Well, I had a question about something my father used to say.

When we would come downstairs in the morning, he would say, have you dressed your bed? Meaning, have we made our beds?

And I’ve never heard anybody else use the dressed quite that way.

And where was your father from?

Well, I grew up in Ohio. My father’s heritage was his grandmother was Belgian.

So I don’t know if that has anything to do with it or not. But he grew up in Ohio?

Yes.

Well, Janet, there’s a lot that’s more interesting than you might think about the word dress in this sense.

The word dress probably goes all the way back to the Latin word dirigere, which means to straighten or to guide.

And in fact, we get our word address or address from that. You know, it directs you someplace.

So this idea of straightening and guiding in English came to also take on the idea of preparing or setting up or arranging.

So today you dress yourself to go out in public. You dress potato salad with chopped parsley, or you dress a wound, or you talk about dressing troops.

And historically, the word dress has had all kinds of different meanings.

In the past, people would talk about dressing land or dressing plants, which meant to cultivate them.

Or you could even dress a clock, which would mean to repair the clock or to clean it.

In parts of the United States, people have also used this word dress in relation to setting up things like on the table.

Dress the table is something that you might hear in West Virginia, Illinois, North Carolina.

And also, particularly in West Virginia, you’ll hear dress the bed.

So it’s not that common, but you can see how it kind of makes sense.

And so that’s why I was curious where your dad was from. I’m interested in the Belgian connection.

That’s very interesting that dress is used in so many ways.

I never really thought about that when dressing a salad, that that was the same derivative.

Right, dressing.

Exactly.

There are a few sources that say that dress the bed is used in parts of the United Kingdom as well.

And even in the U.S., you can sometimes find the sheets being called dress clothes.

Really?

Yeah.

That’s very interesting.

Yeah, I come to think of it. I think of bed clothes, but that’s weird.

That’s right.

Yeah.

But, yeah, that’s true.

Yeah.

Well, then my father wasn’t as weird as I thought, huh?

No.

No.

We all have our lovely bits of language.

Well, Janet, thank you so much for that question.

All right.

Thank you so much, too.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Sometimes those everyday household words have the best stories.

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Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi there. My name’s Aileen Manaccio, and I currently live in Chesapeake, Virginia.

Oh, hi, Aileen. Welcome to the show.

Hi. Well, my mother had an adage for everything.

Every time we did anything, she had a quick quip to share with us, and we would just look at her and go, what?

So my favorite one that my mother always said to us was, excuse the pigs, the hogs went out for a walk.

And that usually followed one of us five girls either burping without excusing ourselves, or if she accidentally did a sound that she was embarrassed about, she would say it as well.

So I just wanted to find out the history, because I’ve lived many places in the country, in the Midwest and the Northeast and down in Virginia, and no one’s ever heard of that.

So I just wanted to share that with you.

So, Eileen, you and your four sisters might burp and then your mother would say, excuse the pig, the hogs went out for a walk.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, well, Eileen, the good news is that Grant and I have definitely heard this.

And over the years, we’ve compiled a long list of other variations on this expression.

Excuse the pig, the hog’s out walking.

Excuse the pig, the hog’s around the corner.

Or excuse the pig, but the hog’s still around.

And it’s usually, as you said, it’s a kind of reprimand.

Even if you burp and excuse yourself, you know, you shouldn’t be having to excuse yourself in the first place.

That’s kind of the message there.

And, gosh, there are lots of different variations of this.

I don’t know how far back it goes, but pardon a pig, a hog would know better.

One of my favorites comes from England, where some people say, pardon, Mrs. Arden, there’s a pig in your garden.

Oh, I love that one. That’s funny. Fascinating. I’m not alone. That’s good.

No, no, not at all. And if you’re out in public and your companion burps, you can say, excuse my pig, he’s a friend.

I like that. There are other things that have nothing to do with hogs and pigs, such as if you burp, you say, greetings from the interior.

Or I don’t remember eating that.

I think that actually was an old Milton Berle joke.

Yeah, there’s a long list.

So, Eileen, to answer your question, we don’t really know the history of it. We just know that it’s definitely out there.

Yeah.

It’s always been out there, apparently.

Wow.

Yeah, people, you know, it’s nice to take it not too seriously because it’s such a human thing.

And it is rude in some places and some cultures.

But, you know, it happens.

Yeah.

And a gentle way to let your kids know that it’s rude, but put a little humor on it.

Yeah.

And what was your version again?

Excuse the pigs, the hogs went out for a walk.

That’s pretty good.

Eileen, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

My pleasure.

It was great talking to you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Tell us the funny ways that you remind the kids of their manners in your house, 877-929-9673.

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Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.